Google+ Approaching 50 Million Users | Hacker News Reader

Google+ Approaching 50 Million Users

thecompiler.org

55 pointsgzomartin29 comments

I don't play the numbers game, because they don't matter as much as whether those numbers happen to include my friends.

My friends were looking for somewhere, and it seems that was G+. So my circles are vibrant and interesting, and keep me going back.

A weird thing though... circles are so useful that the site appears to be dead.

My friends all talk to circles. Every conversation and shared thing is limited to a small audience.

So the public view of all their profiles is: <silence>.

I've started to find this non-ideal. I'm interested in my friends for all that they are, and I know when I've been categorised as I initially did it too. You say something about cycling just to the cyclists... but that's an interest of mine, and my friends like my interests.

I've moved to sharing to Extended Circles or Public all the time. It's far too easy on G+ to end up in very small bubbles concentrated about one thing.

G+ is still missing some form of tags/hashtags/topics to allow posting what is only interesting for some of your "friends", but is in no way private. I often post to only some circles not because something is private, but because I don't want to "spam" ti to people in other circles that probably wouldn't be interested - but might as well be.

I agree.

The use of circles is currently a reaction to the noise on facebook and twitter.

And whilst that is a social reaction (too much noise > too little noise), it needs a technical solution.

I just feel that circles aren't quite it. There's some little thing missing in finding the sweet spot.

The only things that come to mind would be to create topic circles and then place people circles within them.

The circles placed within a topic would be arranged in rings, those closest to the epicentre get fully sharing (with whatever notifications, etc), and those on the periphery would get some lesser shared view (no notifications, not on main stream wall), and any circles not included wouldn't see anything.

But that's probably way too complex to explain to 150 million users.

Why not just add a "topic" or tags? This would at least make it easier to better filter the posts, using a concept that many people already know.

Check out www.subjot.com (reviewed here: http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/08/11/subjot-a-twitter-alter...) for an implementation that lets users subscribe to friends for only certain topics. I suspect it only works with public posts, though (but haven't used the service to know for sure).

Thanks for the suggestion.

Yeah, some of my tech friends limit tech content, others don't. Its arbitrary. There's no community convention here, which is something where Google needs to get more proactive.

Personally, I post almost everything publicly as I don't want random comments about tech t be lost just because the topic is limited. Also, people can't publicly share limited content. This will indeed spam non-tech family/friends, which is ultimately a big risk for G+'s transition from early adopters to mainstream users.

IMO, G+ should have a checkbox against each circle: "posts I share with this circle will be public and searchable" with sufficient warning when you add that circle to a post.

The number of users who sign up in the first couple weeks after a google product goes live isn't predictive of the success of the product.

Buzz had 'tens of millions' [1] of users checking it out in the first week after it launched, and wave had well over a million users try it out.

Looking at search traffic isn't quite as good as user traffic, but its still interesting. Here's search traffic for buzz, plus and wave on the same graph: http://www.google.com/trends?q=google+plus%2C+google+buzz%2C...

This is the search traffic graph of a healthy product (google maps): http://www.google.com/trends?q=google+maps&ctab=0&ge...

[1] http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/millions-of-buzz-users...

Considering there is a giant "ad" at the top of Google.com, I'm surprised it's such a small number, relative to total number of GOOG users.

It was invite only until very recently. And when I was interested in sending out invites it was gmail only, I don't know if that ever changed.

Google+ invites have never been restricted to Gmail users.

They need to share how much time users are spending on G+. That's the number that matters.

Source? That doesnt sound like an unreasonable number, but I'm dubious of articles like this (site I've never been to before, obvious bias, lack of source).

I'm not so sure if this number means anything. Don't get me wrong: I'd love to see G+ succeed, so that FB has some serious competition. But despite nearly 2-dozen early adopter friends on G+, it feels pretty empty. Initially they used to post updates a couple of times a day, and now it's rare to see more than 1 update per week.

Unless Google does something drastic, I feel G+ is going to die a slow death.

Most of the people I know that use it, use it more like twitter, including myself. I follow a lot of people I find interesting, like Wil Wheaton and Paul Irish, they are both really active and post interesting, to me, stuff, which I comment on and reshare and occasionally post stuff I find interesting. Then there is the vast majority of my actual friends and family that just read the content and maybe +1 once in a while. It's basically the 1% rule where 90% of the people lurk, 9% of the people contribute and 1% create content.

Google could buy Netflix to expand Youtube with worldwide paid content coverage, and generate more momentum for expanding G+.

I use it primarily to send kids party photos to parents who are on G+. Very limited shares but don't need to spam the emails and the circles will grow!

Lots of public activity? Nope. Important tool and more secure than Facebook? Sure feels that way...

It's not really a fair comparison ... Google has millions of users already and it's completely frictionless for them to adopt yet another available service. Facebook and Twitter had to sign up brand new users.

I'm perhaps a perfect example ... I don't have a Facebook or Twitter account at all. But I did sign up for G+ in July and do occasionally use it.

And yet, buzz and wave had dismal uptake, whereas G+ appears to be very successful by any metric.

Also, how does "fair" play into anything?

I missed the part where they promoted buzz and wave with a giant animated arrow on the google homepage

I actually agree that it's not a fair comparison, but they did make Buzz an opt-out component of Gmail. No, it's not an arrow on their front page, but what you seem to be getting at is also not completely correct.

50 million very, very quiet users.

It will be interesting once we start seeing numbers that matter, like active users or engagement metrics.

Personally, I've used G+ the first week.. but it's been about a month(?) that I haven't read/talk on it.

G+ is slowly becoming another orkut. it is kind of twitter. it is kind of facebook... it is ... maybe its alright place to get nifty videos, interesting news bits. but facebook is still about your friends. That is all IMO and my gut feeling.

I almost joined, by accident. If you are signed in Gmail or adsense and go there all it takes a button to click.

Posting on it and is a different story, I'm sure.

its just a copy cat of facebook . i never thought that google simply copy things, i expected a very innovative social networking application from google.

I want to join just so I can have Scoble on my circles!! Add him, take a screenshot, print it and then show it to kids on the neighborhood. Now that's a status symbol

;)

IMO, Google+ design and functionality is years light behind Twitter and Facebook, for mentioning two examples. In my opinion they should think about the average user needs and not just the geek-blind-view. It could be both simple and nice (now it is just ugly and barely functional).

Edit: Observation: Despite negative voting, my intention was constructive, in order to point the weak points from my point of view. Go figure.

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